Restaurant Marketing

4 secrets to sticking with your marketing plan

August 1, 2018

Michelle Kim

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You recently created your marketing plan and kicked off a couple awesome campaigns. But you’ve slowly begun to do less with your email campaigns and skipped out on a few great social media opportunities.

How do you get your marketing momentum back on track? Here are 3 tried-and-true steps to equip you to stay motivated during every season of the year.

Build your marketing dream team and keep everyone accountable

Operations is the highest priority for the restaurant, but daily marketing should also be considered just as important as daily operations.

Large restaurant groups have internal marketing departments, constantly keeping their restaurants front-of-mind for their patrons, but that’s not really realistic or viable for small restaurant businesses. Therefore, you have to create your own internal marketing group with the staff you have.

Make marketing, and specific marketing tasks, part of every managerial job description at the time of hire, and part of regular reviews, not just an extra task if the managers have time.

Delegate tasks to different people in the restaurant, so you have more than enough pieces of content to promote on your marketing channels. This means, you need to keep everyone accountable, so every person on the team is responsible of keeping it moving.

Set reasonable goals

Set clear expectations and goals for every team member. For example, you can assign the hostess to submit 5 photos per week; the general manager to handle all customer service reviews on Yelp and social media at least 3 times a week; the restaurant manager to create a rough draft of the weekly newsletter every Mondays.

You can also make marketing a line item in the weekly manager meeting, where the team can discuss potential roadblocks, challenges and wins.

Whether you’re giving an overview of the monthly promotion plan or a simple report on social media stats, it’ll help every person on the team celebrate success – both small and big – and prevent marketing initiatives from fizzling out.

You won’t see results overnight, and tracking and sharing those incremental updates will help drive your plan forward.

Make it part of your daily routine

You might be excited that first month of ideating, creating and promoting your social media posts or email campaigns, but you’ll need to bake it into your schedule and make it a routine to execute on a consistent basis.

It’s a crazy frenzy before service and when service starts, the staff is even busier. There’s really no sitting down in front of your computer or via your mobile phone. Hence, if you’ve delegated this task to an executive chef, bar manager or hostess, they have the exact same problem.

If you’re like any busy professional, you live and die by your calendar. It’s not enough to tell yourself you’ll set aside time on a daily basis – you need to schedule it into your calendar and set alerts to remind you at the same time, every day.

If you skip a day or two, don’t get frustrated and drop the program. Just start again!

Work with a business coach

If there’s no way to carve out time for yourself or staff, hire a consultant to do the job for you. They can stay on top of all the latest mentions about your restaurant on social media and perform all your marketing projects for you.

You can ask the hired professional to create a weekly report of all activities – whether it be paid ads on Google or Facebook, organic social media posts, email marketing – and give insights and recommendations to optimize.

Like personal training, your business coach can challenge you when you need the extra help. They can also bring you the tailored advice specific to your business needs from the diverse experience they bring from working with other companies.